Group chats on Towns can be configured in such a way that only people who fulfill certain criteria—who have specific expertise, say—are allowed to post messages, while everyone else watches from the sidelines. In this scenario, Rubin hopes, large group conversations will no longer be polluted with ill-informed takes and scam posts. He believes the ability for someone to prove that they are a real person using blockchain-based credentials, meanwhile, could help to minimize the opportunity for malicious actors to manipulate public discourse with bots.
The whole endeavor is a gamble that people will want their data—not only identifying information, but details about their activities, spending habits, etc.—etched onto a blockchain in the years ahead. If they’re willing, Rubin theorizes, that data could be used to group people together based on shared experiences and attributes. Towns could have a group for people who attended the latest Taylor Swift tour, or those who hold a qualification in cybersecurity, or anyone who frequently eats out in New York.
Rubin spoke to WIRED about his plan for putting that vision into practice and navigating the thorny problems—around moderation, policing misuse, and echo chamber effects—that have dogged the incumbents he now hopes Towns can overthrow.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joel Khalili: Can you start by explaining how you came to the idea for Towns?
Ben Rubin: I started my career as an architect. Having studied the architecture of real buildings, one of the things that is still a guiding force in everything I do is how you bring people together in very unique ways. I still look at myself as an architect today. It’s just that the medium that I work in is digital.
So it wasn’t just about building a Houseparty follow-up or taking on Discord and WhatsApp.
As we become more and more connected, there is an opportunity to create spaces for people that actually affect how conversations are happening, what intimacy looks like, and so on. There are some things that you cannot do with bricks that you can do with the digital world, and obviously vice versa.
Of course.
One of the interesting things about Houseparty is that it was a double opt-in graph—like the Facebook graph—where I ask you for friendship, then you need to accept it. It’s not just that I follow you, as with Instagram. But the moment that happens, every time you are now in a conversation with your friends—just like at a houseparty where you might be talking to somebody I don’t know—I can go and say, “Hey.”